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Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has hinted at a possible solution to Ethereum’s scalability issues, involving a complete revamp of the consensus layer and a new road map for the Beacon Chain. This has led to speculation about an Ethereum 3.0 upgrade and the creation of a zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine, potentially removing gas usage limits and reducing the need for layer-2 rollups. However, some in the network are sceptical. Meanwhile, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin suggested execution sharding and the application of zero-knowledge and optimistic approaches to enhance system performance, potentially enabling millions of transactions per second. But he warned full integration could take years.

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A recent social media post by someone deeply involved in Ethereum has sparked chatter about a possible solution to Ethereum’s well-known scalability problems. On Nov. 11, Justin Drake, an active Ethereum researcher, mentioned on X that he’s planning an “ambitious” project for Ethereum. He even discussed a “from-scratch” revamp of the Ethereum consensus layer, a move which most are interpreting as an attempt to tackle its long-standing scalability issues.

Drake mentioned that his ultimate goal is pitching a plan for a Beacon Chain road map. The expectation is he will share this proposal at Devcon, an event in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov. 12.

Following Justin’s post, whispers of a ETH 3.0 upgrade started making the round among the Ethereum crowd. Doug Colkitt, founder of Ambient Finance, even posted about a chatter going around that ETH 3.0 is going to be a “second merge into a new consensus targeting 1-second block times”, and a native zero-knowledge Ethereum Virtual Machine (zkEVM).

Colkitt feels that if these gossips turn out to be true, Ethereum’s move to create a zkEVM would be a game-changer. With such an upgrade, the limits on gas usage could be removed entirely. Builders could create as large blocks as they needed, as nodes would only need to verify the snark. The only scalability limit left would be bandwidth, according to him.

Colkitt is quite positive that a zkEVM could mean scalable limits are set on the need and not a preset limit, and could do away with the need for layer-2 rollups. However, not everyone in the Ethereum network believes in the ETH 3.0 gossip. Some don’t buy the rumor, pointing out that if such a significant update was coming, they would have known about it months in advance. They noted that Ethereum Improvement Proposals related to such an update would likely have already been on the table if the upgrade was close.

Talking about possible solutions for Ethereum’s scalability, Consensys CEO, Joe Lubin, mentioned that Ethereum’s ecosystem may revisit the idea of execution sharding, potentially using a zkEVM at layer-1 to create identical execution shards. He suggested that there’re a lot of methods from the development of zero-knowledge approaches and optimistic approaches that could be applied to the Ethereum layer-1 to enhance every aspect of the system. Lubin is quite hopeful about how these attempts could enhance Ethereum’s scalability. He believe that these approaches could lead to Ethereum running millions of transactions per second. However, even with such optimism, he admits that complete integration could take some years.